Analysing and Optimising Technical and Business Processes

A company uses BigQuery for large-scale analytics. They have a fixed monthly budget and want to ensure predictable costs for query processing, even when many users run concurrent queries. Which BigQuery pricing model should they use?

A financial services firm runs batch risk calculations nightly using a large Compute Engine VM with a GPU. Jobs complete in 4 hours but are not time-sensitive. To reduce costs without sacrificing reliability, the firm enables preemptible VMs but finds that jobs are interrupted and restarting from scratch causes delays. What is the best approach to improve reliability while maintaining cost savings?

Your company uses Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL to support a web application. During peak hours, the database experiences high read load, causing slow query responses. You need to improve read performance while ensuring data consistency. What should you do?

A company's BigQuery costs are higher than expected. They run many ad-hoc queries with filters on the 'transaction_date' column and 'customer_id' column. They also have a materialized view that is rarely used. Which combination of actions will MOST effectively reduce query costs?

A company wants to analyze their Google Cloud spending and receive recommendations for rightsizing resources. Which tool provides this functionality?

A media company runs a monthly batch pipeline that transcodes video uploads stored in Cloud Storage. The pipeline runs on a Managed Instance Group of Compute Engine VMs and typically completes in 6 hours. The VMs are only needed during this window, but the team wants to minimise the operational effort of stopping and starting the group. Which approach best optimises both cost and operational overhead?

A company wants to implement blameless postmortems as part of their SRE practices. Which THREE principles should they follow?

Your company runs a stateful application on Compute Engine instances in a managed instance group. The application requires that each instance maintains a unique identity and persistent storage. You need to ensure that instances can be recreated without data loss and that they retain their identities. What should you do?

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine behind a HTTP(S) Load Balancer. They want to reduce latency for users worldwide. Which Google Cloud service should they use?

A company wants to set a monthly spending limit for their Compute Engine usage and receive alerts when spending exceeds a threshold. Which tool should they use?

A company runs batch analytics workloads on Compute Engine that can tolerate interruptions. They want to reduce compute costs by up to 60-90%. Which compute option is the most cost-effective?

Your company runs a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The development team complains that they lack visibility into which service is causing latency spikes during peak hours. You need to implement a solution that provides distributed tracing and service-level metrics without modifying application code. Which approach should you use?

A company is migrating 50 on-premises VMs to Compute Engine. They need to minimise downtime and want an automated lift-and-shift migration that replicates disks incrementally. Which Google Cloud service should be used?

An e-commerce platform uses Cloud SQL (MySQL) for its transactional database. They are experiencing performance degradation during peak hours due to high read traffic. They need to improve read throughput without modifying the application code. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose 2)

A company wants to reduce costs for a batch analytics job that runs nightly for 4 hours on Compute Engine VMs. The job is fault-tolerant and can handle instance restarts. Which Compute Engine VM pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

A company runs a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They want to ensure that each service can only communicate with the services it explicitly depends on, and they need to enforce this at the network layer without modifying application code. They also want to monitor allowed and denied traffic. What should they do?

Your organization runs a critical application on Compute Engine. The monthly bill shows sustained use discounts but the finance team wants to reduce costs further. The workload runs 24/7 with predictable usage for at least the next 12 months. You need to achieve the maximum possible discount without affecting performance or availability. What should you do?

Your organization runs a microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Each microservice has its own deployment and horizontal pod autoscaler. You want to implement a robust cost governance process that provides chargeback to each team and prevents budget overruns. You need to attribute costs accurately without modifying application code. What should you do?

A team uses Cloud CDN to cache static assets. They update assets by deploying new versions with new URLs. However, sometimes they need to invalidate the cache for a critical fix immediately without changing the URL. What should they do?

Your company uses a CI/CD pipeline that builds container images and stores them in Artifact Registry. The images are deployed to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You need to ensure that only images that have been scanned for vulnerabilities and approved by a security team can be deployed to the production GKE cluster. You want to enforce this policy automatically without modifying the CI/CD pipeline. What should you do?

A company operates a critical application on Google Cloud and wants to define a Service Level Objective (SLO) for its latency. They need to measure the proportion of requests that complete within 200 ms over a 28-day rolling window. They also want to alert when the error budget is being consumed too quickly. What should they use?

A team runs periodic BigQuery queries on a large dataset. They notice high costs due to full table scans. They want to reduce costs and improve query performance. Which two actions should they take? (Choose two options that best fit the scenario.)

Your organization runs a customer-facing web application on a managed instance group of Compute Engine VMs behind an HTTP(S) load balancer. The monthly bill shows that the VMs are running at only 15% average CPU utilization, yet the team insists they need the current number of VMs to handle peak traffic. You want to reduce compute costs without risking performance during traffic spikes. What should you do?

A global SaaS company wants to reduce the latency of its API for users in Asia, Europe, and North America. The API is stateless and runs on GKE in a single region. The company wants a solution that improves latency for all users without changing the application code. Which approach should the architect recommend?

A company is performing a TCO analysis to compare on-premises costs with Google Cloud. Which cost should they include as a hidden operational cost on-premises?

You are the architect for a company that runs a three-tier web application on Compute Engine. The CTO wants to reduce the monthly cloud bill without impacting performance or availability. You review the billing export in BigQuery and notice that the VMs are sized for peak load, but CPU utilization rarely exceeds 20% on weekdays and 5% on weekends. The application is stateless and uses an external Cloud SQL database. Which cost optimization strategy should you implement first?

Your organization is adopting a multi-cloud strategy and wants to ensure consistent security policies across Google Cloud and another cloud provider. You need to centrally manage and enforce security policies, such as preventing public access to storage buckets, across both environments. What should you do?

An organization wants to reduce costs for a batch data processing job that runs nightly and is resilient to interruptions. The job can be restarted from checkpoints. Which Compute Engine VM pricing model should be used?

A company is migrating an on-premises PostgreSQL database (5 TB) to Cloud SQL. They need minimal downtime and automated schema conversion if needed. Which GCP service should they use?

An engineer wants to migrate an on-premises MySQL database (5.6) to Cloud SQL for MySQL with minimal downtime. Which service should they use?

A financial services company is designing a new application on Google Cloud. The application must comply with PCI DSS and internal policies that require strict separation of duties and least privilege. The security team wants to ensure that developers cannot modify production resources, but they need to deploy code frequently. Which approach should the cloud architect recommend to meet these requirements while supporting continuous deployment?

A company runs batch analytics workloads each night on Compute Engine VMs. The workloads are fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. The finance team wants to reduce compute costs. Which Compute Engine pricing model should they use?

A media company stores video files in Cloud Storage for streaming. Infrequently accessed videos older than 90 days are currently in Standard storage. To reduce costs, they want to automatically move these files to a lower-cost storage class and delete them after 3 years. Which configuration should they use?

An organization is planning to move 500 TB of archival data from on-premises to Cloud Storage. The data is not frequently accessed, and the network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps. What is the most efficient migration approach?

A company has a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance that experiences high connection overhead. Developers frequently open and close connections. Which solution reduces connection overhead without code changes?

A company wants to use BigQuery with a predictable monthly cost, regardless of query volume. They have a steady state of around 500 concurrent slots. Which pricing model should they choose?

Which Google Cloud service automatically computes the optimal size or tier for underutilized Compute Engine instances and generates recommendations to reduce cost?

Your company uses Cloud Monitoring to track the performance of a microservices application. The SRE team wants to define an SLO for the latency of a critical API. They need to measure the proportion of requests that complete within 200 ms over a rolling 30-day window. Which approach should they use to implement this SLO?

An engineer is designing a Bigtable schema for time-series data consisting of sensor readings. Each sensor emits a reading every second. The access pattern is to retrieve all readings for a specific sensor within a time range. Which row key design will provide the best performance?

A company runs a critical application on Compute Engine. The operations team wants to improve the mean time to recovery (MTTR) for incidents. They currently use manual runbooks stored in a wiki. You need to recommend a solution that automates incident response and integrates with existing monitoring. What should you do?

A company runs a web application on Compute Engine behind a Global HTTPS Load Balancer. Users report slow page loads, especially for static assets. The development team wants to cache content closer to users without modifying code. Which GCP service should they enable?

A company stores infrequently accessed data in Cloud Storage Standard class. To reduce costs, they want to automatically move objects older than 90 days to a lower-cost storage class. Which approach should they use?

A team is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. They need to ensure RPO of less than 1 hour and RTO of less than 4 hours. The application runs on Compute Engine with persistent disks and uses Cloud SQL for MySQL. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose 3.)

A company is planning to migrate a large on-premises Oracle database (10 TB) to Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. They need to minimise downtime and ensure data integrity. Which TWO services or tools should they use? (Choose TWO.)

A company runs batch machine learning training jobs that can be interrupted. They want to reduce compute costs. Which Compute Engine VM pricing model is MOST cost-effective?

An application uses Cloud Bigtable and experiences high latency for reads. The row key is a timestamp prefix followed by a random ID. Queries often scan a range of timestamps for a specific ID. What design change would MOST improve read performance?

A company wants to ensure that their development teams follow best practices for cost optimization. They want to implement a process that reviews architecture decisions before deployment and provides recommendations. Which Google Cloud tool should they use to get automated cost recommendations for their existing resources?

An application uses Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) and experiences high connection overhead, often exhausting the max connections limit. The team wants to maintain a pool of persistent connections without modifying application code. Which solution should they implement?

A company wants to automate the deployment of their infrastructure on Google Cloud using a declarative approach. They need to manage resources such as VPCs, subnets, and Compute Engine instances in a repeatable and version-controlled manner. They also want to preview changes before applying them. Which tool should they use?

A retail company runs its order-processing system on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The operations team wants to improve the reliability and cost efficiency of the cluster. They observe that several workloads have no resource requests or limits set, and some nodes are consistently underutilised while others are overcommitted. Which two actions should the architect recommend to address these issues? (Choose two.)

An enterprise is planning to migrate 200 on-premises VMs to Google Cloud. The CIO wants to ensure that the migration aligns with the business goal of reducing IT operational overhead by 30% while maintaining application performance. The team has already completed a technical assessment of the VMs. Which additional step should the cloud architect take to ensure the migration plan is aligned with the stated business goal?

A financial services firm runs a three-tier application on Google Cloud. The security team requires that all outbound traffic from the application tier to the internet be inspected by a centralised next-generation firewall appliance, and that the application tier have no public IP addresses. The network team wants to minimise changes to the existing VPC. Which design should the architect recommend?

A company runs a global application that requires strong consistency across regions for financial transactions. Which database should they choose?

A startup is migrating its on-premises MySQL database (5 TB) to Cloud SQL. The database is mission-critical and downtime must be minimized. Which migration service should they use to reduce downtime?

A company is migrating 500 TB of on-premises file server data to Cloud Storage. The on-premises network has a 1 Gbps link to Google Cloud, but the migration must complete within 30 days. What is the MOST cost-effective and reliable method?

A team wants to define an SLO for a service that requires 99.9% availability over a 30-day window. They need to measure the ratio of successful requests to total requests. Which SLI should they use?

A team wants to provide a consistent, low-latency experience for global users accessing static content (images, CSS, JS) hosted on Cloud Storage. They also need to be able to invalidate cached content quickly when updates occur. Which service should they use?

A company runs a batch processing job that uses preemptible VMs. The job occasionally fails due to VM preemption. They want to improve reliability without significantly increasing cost. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose TWO.)

A company is moving a legacy application to Compute Engine. The application has inconsistent resource usage and the team wants to optimise costs without performance degradation. They are evaluating committed use discounts (CUDs) and other discount types. Which THREE statements are correct about CUDs? (Choose 3)

A company is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to BigQuery. They want to minimize the cost of storing large amounts of historical data that is rarely queried. The data must remain available for queries but can tolerate slightly longer query times. What should they do?

A company wants to improve the performance of their Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. They notice many idle connections and slow queries. Which THREE actions could help? (Choose 3)

A healthcare company stores patient documents in Cloud Storage. Compliance requires that documents be retained for seven years and that no user, including administrators, can delete or overwrite them during that period. The company wants the simplest configuration that enforces this. What should the architect implement?

Your company is designing a new application on Google Cloud. The security team requires that all data at rest be encrypted with customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and that access to these keys be audited. You need to implement a solution that meets these requirements. (Choose two.)

A company wants to automatically move data from Cloud Storage Standard to Nearline after 30 days and to Archive after 90 days. Which approach should they use?

Your company runs a microservices application on GKE. The development team wants to adopt a progressive delivery strategy to reduce the risk of new releases. They need to route a small percentage of production traffic to a new version, monitor key metrics, and automatically roll back if errors increase. Which approach should you recommend?

Your organization is adopting Google Cloud and wants to establish a cost governance framework. You need to implement mechanisms that provide visibility into spending and allow proactive control over costs. (Choose two.)

A company wants to migrate a MySQL database running on-premises to Cloud SQL with minimal downtime. Which GCP service should they use?

Your company has a complex legacy application that runs on a single large VM. The application is stateful and has a monolithic architecture. You are tasked with migrating it to Google Cloud with minimal changes, but you also want to improve its reliability and scalability over time. Which migration strategy should you initially recommend?

A development team uses BigQuery for analytical queries. They want to reduce query costs for a large table that is frequently filtered by a date column and a customer_id column. Which TWO table design strategies will reduce the amount of data scanned? (Choose 2)

An application running on Compute Engine frequently makes connection requests to a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance. The connections are short-lived and many are created per second. What should be implemented to reduce latency and connection overhead?

An e-commerce application uses Firestore for product catalog. They need to run complex analytical queries on the catalog data, such as aggregations and joins, without impacting production performance. What is the best approach?

An organization deploys a web application on Compute Engine behind a global HTTPS load balancer. They want to reduce latency for users worldwide and minimize load on backend instances. Which GCP service should they use?

A company is migrating a 200 TB on-premises file server to Cloud Storage. The network bandwidth is limited to 100 Mbps. The migration must complete within 30 days. Which approach should they use?

A company is adopting Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. After a major incident, they want to conduct a review to understand what went wrong and how to prevent recurrence, without blaming individuals. Which SRE practice should they follow?

A company runs a latency-sensitive web application on Compute Engine in us-east1. They want to improve response times for users in Europe and Asia without changing the application architecture. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose 2.)